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The Time of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis and the Past
Jason B. Jones
Central Connecticut State University
jonesjason1@ccsu.edu
(c) 2004 Jason B. Jones.
All rights reserved.
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1. In his seminar of 1966-67 on the logic of fantasy, Jacques Lacan
reported to his audience that he had recently been asked what
need, what exigency drove him to theorize the /objet a/ as
object/cause of desire. According to the transcripts of this
unpublished seminar, Lacan also passed along his answer: it was
about time. This witty response discloses an important insight
into Lacan's re-reading of Freud: psychoanalysis, in its
metapsychology and its clinical orientation, is fundamentally a
theory of temporality and history. When we speak of sexuality or
the unconscious, for instance, we are essentially just euphemizing
the past. And although psychoanalysis is obsessed with the past,
it also, in the Lacanian approach, demands that we reject memory
and our common experiences of the past. In its place, we are
offered retroaction or /Nachträglichkeit/, deferred action: a
system whereby future events control the meaning of ones in the
past. To put all of this a slightly different way: within
psychoanalysis, effects frequently determine their causes, rather
than the other way around. This way of thinking, I want to
suggest, is psychoanalysis's most original interpretive
contribution, and recalling its structure may be helpful to
humanists and psychoanalysts alike. For, culturally as in the
clinic, the best interpretations arise from a proper understanding
of retroaction.
2. If "everyone knows" that Lacan emphasizes deferred action,
nonetheless it is the case that the peculiar mode of causality
this implies is still far from understood. Joël Dor has argued
that the problem with so-called "wild" analysis--and, implicitly,
the sociocultural or literary application of psychoanalysis--is
its application of a positivistic causal model to psychoanalytic
theory (5-6). And as I will show, even sophisticated versions of
political analysis often fall on the side of memory or
reminiscence rather than history, properly (or, at any rate,
psychoanalytically) speaking. The bizarre temporal logic of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, in other words, potentially clarifies the
stakes of social and cultural psychoanalysis, especially as such a
project seeks to grapple with the "mutual foundering of the
subjective and the social" (Jones, "Revisiting" 29).
I. Two Sides of the Ahistorical Coin
3. Before turning to the particulars of this argument, I want briefly
to acknowledge two widely held criticisms of psychoanalysis, both
founded on the idea that it is either ahistorical or aggressively
hostile to history. We can call these criticisms "universalist"
and "deterministic."
4. Many people of course reject psychoanalysis for purporting to
discover universal traits, such as the Oedipus complex, the fact
of castration, or even the unconscious. In this argument,
universal traits are supposed to be outside of history, present in
all cultures and across all times. Some people accept that
universal traits are in principle possible, but claim that Freud's
"discoveries" are unverifiable. For others--and perhaps this route
has been more common in the humanities over the past two
decades--universality itself has come under suspicion, generally
as a masquerade for power.[1 <#foot1>] Whatever the particular
objection, critics who lament psychoanalysis's universalism
typically point to the variety of human sexual and familial
relations as a /prima facie/ disproof of Freud. The best response
to these objections has come from writers such as Joan Copjec,
Charles Shepherdson, and Slavoj Zizek, who, each in their
different ways, observe that the universalist argument misses the
point: rather than prescribing a single model of development for
everyone, psychoanalysis instead sets itself the task of
explaining why sexuality and identity are not natural.[2 <#foot2>]
Freud himself puts this well in the Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905), explaining that "the sexual instinct and the
sexual object are merely soldered together," which means that
every person's sexual choices warrant explanation, rather than
being self-evident or only biological (148). The florid variance
of sexual and familial dispositions, and their shifts over time,
confirm psychoanalysis rather than contradict it. In fact, we
could turn the universalist criticism around: psychoanalysis would
be at a loss to interpret a symptom-free society with static
family and sexual arrangements. Psychoanalysis explains how we can
experience history at all, complete with a distinct past, present,
and future, as opposed to a ceaseless and cyclical natural rhythm,
where temporality is not in question.
5. While the universalist view is now espoused mainly (though not
exclusively) by psychoanalysis's critics, the determinist view is,
as it were, analysts' and theoreticians' in-house way of denying
history. There is of course a grain of truth in the popular notion
that psychoanalysts always blame childhood wishes and conflicts
for adults' suffering. According to the cliché, the analyst begins
by asking the analysand to "tell me about your mother"--suggesting
that the root of one's problems is to be discovered in the history
of the mother's misdeeds. But of course if suffering stems from
infantile desires, then we are essentially saying that, in some
basic way, people never grow up: we are, in effect, denying the
operative force of history. Any theory of history has to be able
to accommodate change, and, in too many versions of
psychoanalysis, change is essentially ruled out. And though I will
return to this point in some detail later, let me say briefly that
developmental versions of psychoanalysis reproduce this difficulty
in a more putatively scientific form. By taking the fables and
mythologies of psychoanalysis literally, rather than as logical
explications of fantasy, developmental accounts of psychoanalysis
tend to deny the contingency of events in favor of a schematic,
and therefore nonhistorical, approach to the past. A more
insidious version of determinism arises when we conceive of the
restoration of the past as an important goal of analysis--when we
try, as the expression goes, to make the telling fit the
experience--rather than conceiving of that restoration as merely
an early step to be overcome. This mode of analysis depends on the
coercive demands of shared reality and on the tyranny of the past.
Moreover--and this is a point I will return to soon--it assumes
that the subject "fits" the world.
6. This version of determinism is, as I have said, insidious, because
it's nearly impossible to avoid. I can illustrate this difficulty
with a recent example. In "The Direction of the Treatment and the
Principles of Its Power" (1958), Jacques Lacan dismisses the
recuperative powers of memory. Here's how Bruce Fink renders the
passage in his new re-translation:
But that, of course, is no more than a misconception: one does
not get better because one remembers. One remembers because
one gets better. Since this formulation was found, there has
no longer been any question regarding the reproduction of
symptoms, but only regarding the reproduction of analysts; the
reproduction of patients has been resolved. (249)[3 <#foot3>]
Fink glosses this paragraph with a footnote: "this entire
paragraph seems to be ironic, Lacan clearly agreeing with Freud
that one gets better because one remembers" ("Direction" Fink
345n). What's notable about this footnote is the way that a moment
of doubt--registered by /seems/--is immediately braced into
certainty by a foregone conclusion of what Lacan must
mean--registered by /clearly/ (and when has it ever been safe to
describe the /Écrits/ as "clear"?). But Fink's certainty is
arguably too hasty. This paragraph from "The Direction of the
Treatment" is consistent, for example, with Lacan's explicit
insistence, in Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique (1953-54),
that "it is less a matter of remembering than rewriting history"
(Seminar I 14/Le séminaire I 20). In an analysis, Lacan
emphasizes, it is rewriting history that makes one better, and
which then allows one to "remember" more. As I will be arguing
throughout this essay, the crucial thing to keep in mind is that
Lacan means this point about rewriting history literally: it's not
a question of making one's contemporary telling fit the past
experience; instead, it's a matter of changing the past
experience--or, perhaps more precisely, of changing its structural
inscription in the signifying chain--such that it corresponds with
one's contemporary telling. The paradox of psychoanalysis is that
this historical writing is undertaken in the name of futurity, not
revisionism. Indeed, the first two seminars carefully distinguish
between the everyday experience of memory, which Lacan deprecates
as /reminiscence/, and the structuring effects of symbolic memory,
which he often calls /rememoration./ His disdain for reminiscence
persists throughout the decades of the seminar. In the passage
from "The Direction of the Treatment," Lacan means that the
efflorescence of memory that accompanies a successful
interpretation reflects rather than produces the rewriting of the
symbolic necessary to an effective treatment. Rather than being
"ironic" in this passage, Lacan is stating his point in plain
speech: interpretation provides meaning and truth to otherwise
senseless events.
7. One need not be especially adept in either psychoanalysis or
literary criticism to recognize that such precipitous certainty
suggests anxious defense. (Especially Fink, in The Lacanian
Subject [1995], afforded such painstaking and enlightening
scrutiny to Lacan's claims about symbolic memory from the first
two seminars and "Direction.") The cherished dogma, in this
instance, is that the truth--represented by memory--will set us
free. The claim that remembering makes one better salves the ego,
and serves as a palliative to those anxious about psychoanalysis's
status as a science or therapeutic practice. The analyst makes a
pact with the analysand's ego, saying, in effect, "Come with me,
and I will help you discover the truth about your past, and how
you have come to be what you are. It may be difficult, and you
will have to overcome resistances, but ultimately you will conquer
the unconscious's fantasmatic version of reality. You will soon
learn that you and reality are not in conflict, but fundamentally
in accord." And that means psychoanalysis is really and truly a
science, because it is oriented toward reality, appealing
constantly to it as the guarantor of psychic health. While of
course most analysts have--and certainly Bruce Fink has--a more
complex view of how analysis works, I think it's fair to
characterize this view as the unacknowledged or unconscious
fantasy of analysis itself, and to say that it constantly
threatens to override psychoanalysis's distinctive approach to
causality and the past.
8. Despite my criticisms of the determinist view, I want to
acknowledge that psychoanalysis does accept a certain determinism,
albeit an inverted determinism according to which the future
determines the past. For the time of psychoanalysis is neither
developmental nor experiential, but retroactive. Freud ceases to
be a psychologist and becomes the inventor of psychoanalysis when
he rethinks the etiology of hysteria: in Studies on Hysteria
(1895), Freud maintained that "hysterics suffer mainly from
reminiscences" (7)--which means that they suffer from their
past--while in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900 [1899]) he
shifts ground, arguing "hysterical symptoms are not attached to
actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of
memories" (529-30)--which means that their unconscious has
literally changed their past. Instead of suggesting that
psychoanalysis aims to recover the past, then, I want to suggest
that its sense of the past is logical, not experiential. Its
temporality emerges in phrases like Freud's claim that every
finding of an object is in fact a re-finding (Three 222); in Jean
Laplanche's observation that sexuality and the unconscious lean
upon the biological order (15-18); and in Lacan's mathemes and
topological fever-dreams. The point is that causality and history
work retroactively, belatedly--in a word, according to
/Nachträglichkeit./ On the one hand, this is a point obvious to
anyone who has read Freud or Lacan. Lacan's discovery, in Freud's
text, of deferred action ought incessantly to remind us of the
doubtful relevance of what we usually think of as memory, and of
what we normally think of as the past.
II. The Picture of the Past
9. Psychoanalysis, Lacan always says, has no tools at its disposal
but speech. Psychoanalysis speaks to the subject of
enunciation--of speaking as such--rather than the subject of the
enunciated--of the particular thing that is said: "there is no
unconscious except for the speaking being" (Television 5). This
focus emphasizes two temporal dimensions of analysis. First, an
abyss of time yawns between the beginning and ending of an
utterance: in that abyss, and in no other time or place, can you
find the subject. Second, by focusing on speech, Lacan emphasizes
a retroaction proper to subjectivity: the end of the utterance
completes the meaning of the beginning, and in some instances
radically revises it. But Lacan also means that what the subject
says is a bit of a ruse, a lure, a trick. The subject is always
saying one thing and unknowingly meaning another. This is commonly
misunderstood: it's not so much that the subject's speech is a
kind of double /entendre/ in its content; rather, the point is
that there's a structural double /entendre/ inherent to speech.
The hysteric's symptoms and refusals amount to a kind of question:
/che vuoi/? Why am I what you say that I am? No matter what the
content of the speech, the message is always elsewhere, on that
Other stage.
10. The point of dwelling on this aspect of analysis is that the
subject's speech is so frequently obsessed with the past. In five
texts from the 1950s--Seminar I (1953-1954), Seminar II: The Ego
in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis
(1954-55), "The Freudian Thing" (1955), "The Instance of the
Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason since Freud" (1957), and
"The Direction of the Treatment" (1958), Lacan repeatedly makes
the same two arguments: if you think you understand what the
analysand is saying, you're wrong; and you're never more wrong
than when the analysand is speaking of the past. He argues that in
most analyses, the analyst and analysand make the same mistake:
both believe in the truth of what they are saying about the
patient's past, symptoms, and "cure." Perhaps more precisely, they
are alike deluded by the emotional verisimilitude of the
analysand's memories.
11. For the seductiveness of the past constitutes the engine and the
risk of analysis--a Janus-faced reality that emerges immediately
whenever Freud writes on technique. Consider, for instance, this
remarkable description of psychoanalytic progress from "The Future
Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy" (1910):
At its beginning psycho-analytic treatment was inexorable and
exhausting. The patient had to say everything himself, and the
physician's activity consisted of urging him on incessantly.
To-day things have a more friendly air. The treatment is made
up of two parts--what the physician infers and tells the
patient, and the patient's working-over of what he has heard.
(141)
Even granting the Rotary Club atmosphere of this particular essay,
in which Freud tries to recruit more adherents to the
psychoanalytic movement, there is something a little disquieting
about a description in which the only person who speaks is the
analyst! A more typical view--and one that is often quoted--is
found in "Constructions in Analysis" (1937), where he claims that
"what we are in search of is a picture of the patient's forgotten
years that shall be alike trustworthy and in all essential
respects complete" (258). What I will be claiming throughout this
section is that this view of analysis is a sort of trick.
Certainly, there is an attempt to attain a complete version of the
past, but not because it is valuable in itself. Narratives about
the past turn out to be a sort of royal road to the unconscious,
better even than dreams, because the constant disruptions of the
"picture [...] in all essential respects complete" force the
analysand into a dawning recognition that language speaks us.
12. This emphasis on the self-estrangement of historical narrative
emerges early in Freud's descriptions of technique. In a short,
eponymous encyclopedia article, called "Freud's Psycho-Analytic
Procedure" (1904), he declares that, after explaining the analytic
rule to his analysands, he immediately asks for a "detailed
account of their case history" (251). At first glance, this seems
trivial and self-evident: of course the doctor will want to know
his patient's history. But surely if the idea of /repression/
means anything it means this: that analysands are constitutively
incapable of delivering the goods when it comes to their own
illness. It is not only that they will have forgotten or confused
key details, but that the story they want to tell is almost
certainly not the story that they should be telling, at least not
if they want to improve. (And, for that matter, there is no reason
to trust that the analysand will want to improve--after all, the
subject has a passion for ignorance, and if improvement were
simply a matter of wanting to, psychoanalysis would just be an
especially trite form of self-help.)[4 <#foot4>] In other words, a
founding axiom of Freudian technique is that anything the
analysand says during this "detailed account" will be misleading.
13. Misleading, at least, at the level of /content./ Freud declares in
this encyclopedia article that asking for a history of the case
has a pragmatic benefit: the analysand's historical narrative will
produce a useful number of "associations," which Freud defines as
"the involuntary thoughts (most frequently regarded as disturbing
elements and therefore ordinarily pushed aside) which so often
break across the continuity of a consecutive narrative" (251). In
other words, Freud asks for a narrative because he knows he will
not get one. If analysands follows the analytic rule, then their
narratives will always be interrupted. The claim here is not that
the associations are the "true" history, or that they
inadvertently provide relevant facts that the analysand has
forgotten. Instead, Freud calls our attention to their meaningless
disruptiveness. Put another way, it is the disruption that is the
meaning, insofar as it signifies the existence of an Other
speaker. Lacan characterizes this emphasis on disruption thus:
"following the thread of analytic discourse goes in the direction
of nothing less than breaking up anew, inflecting, marking with
its own camber--a camber that could not even be sustained as that
of lines of force--that which produces the break or discontinuity"
(Seminar XX 44/ Le séminaire XX 44). The analyst must, on the one
hand, inflect the analysand's discourse otherwise, in order to
note moments of disruption, but as he says here, this marking
cannot be sustained--it cannot, in other words, support a new
narrative. In a Lacanian analysis, this point is embodied in the
technique of punctuation, which enables the analysand to see that,
to a certain degree, even the purportedly consecutive narrative is
in fact a failure to master speech. As Lacan succinctly explains
in "The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis" (1953),
"punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning; changing the
punctuation renews or upsets it; and incorrect punctuation
distorts it" (96/"Fonction" 313-14). In other words, in the course
of their narratives, analysands will naturally lend emphasis to
certain words or phrases, an emphasis that is as much a part of
their meaning as any lexical definition. The analyst tries to
shift that emphasis in a variety of ways--by ending the session,
by a request to repeat a word, or even by a well-timed "Hmm?" The
effect, Lacan asserts, is to reveal to the analysand that there is
an unconscious: "in order to free the subject's speech, we
introduce him to the language of his desire, that is, to the
/primary language/ in which--beyond what he tells us of
himself--he is already speaking to us unbeknown to himself, first
and foremost, in the symbols of his symptom" (80/"Fonction" 293).
This amounts to a lesson in non-mastery: that the stories
analysands /want/ to tell about their past are not the whole
story. During the first months of an analysis, the analyst's
interventions may well be confined simply to punctuating the
analysand's speech in this fashion. In section three, we will
reconsider punctuation and its relation to what is called
regression; for now it is enough to note that for both Freud and
Lacan, what is punctuated, early in the analysis, is analysands'
narratives about the past.
14. Why does the past need to be punctuated so aggressively? What is
it about analysands' narratives of their past that cries out for
resignification? To answer these questions, Lacan distinguishes
two kinds of memory, /reminiscence/ and /rememoration./ In effect,
reminiscence is our everyday experience of memory, the historical
narrative offered up by the analysand; as I will show in section
three, rememoration is Lacan's name for the work of symbolic
memory, the structural history of the subject, which organizes its
existence but which cannot be brought forward into consciousness.
15. The first two seminars, and many of the early /écrits/, devote
themselves to Lacan's critique of aiming at reminiscences as an
analytic end in themselves. He claims, in Seminar II, that
"reminiscence properly speaking [...] is the passage into the
imaginary" (320/Le séminaire II 369). The argument here is
obviously not that the memories are false, though that may be the
case. Instead, Lacan wants us to see that reminiscences buttress,
or, at the bare minimum, refuse to challenge, our self-image. The
specificity of psychoanalysis's approach to memory emerges when we
recall that even traumatic memories are imaginary in this way.
Freud repudiates the seduction hypothesis in 1897, when he decides
that his patients are at least sometimes not remembering actual
events of abuse, but rather reporting fantasies that enact
unacknowledged desires. Psychoanalysis begins with the observation
that sometimes it is more comforting to imagine oneself a victim
than to acknowledge experiencing certain desires.
16. Lacan's point is not merely that reminiscences can bolster the
self-esteem of analysands. The term /imaginary/ designates also
the structuring fantasy of a unified body--that is, it refers to
our psychic picture of our bodily unity, a unity that often
clashes with our experience of our bodily life. It is this
imaginary unity that justifies Freud's claim that the ego is a
bodily ego. In "The Freudian Thing," Lacan observes that
reminiscences will always be voiced in relation to this unity:
It is not because of some mystery concerning the
indestructibility of certain childhood desires that the laws
of the unconscious determine analyzable symptoms. The
subject's imaginary shaping by his desires--which are more or
less fixated or regressed in relation to the object--is too
inadequate and partial to provide the key. (133/"La chose
freudienne" 431)
What persists from childhood is less a particular wish or desire
that could be recalled to mind than a structuring outlook on the
world, a tendency to assume that a present-day desire means one
thing and not another, or at any rate, that it can be alleviated
or satisfied one way and not another. Lacan instead wants to
emphasize memory's signifying structure, and the metaphorical
transformations through which trauma becomes represented in the
psyche.
17. Lacan also claims that reminiscences mistake the subject's
relationship to objects. Freud said that every object is in fact a
re-found one. As we have just seen, a reminiscence associates a
particular object with a recollected desire--that is, it specifies
a particular object as the source of satisfaction or trauma.
Viewed this way, the history offered by the analysand will be the
story of innumerable inadequate substitutes for the one real loss.
But such a perspective misunderstands the relationships of objects
out there in the world to the subject's objects:
Freud distinguishes two completely different structurations of
human experience--one which, along with Kierkegaard, I called
/ancient/, based on reminiscence, presupposing agreement,
harmony between man and the world of his objects, which means
that he recognizes them, because in some way, he has always
known them--and, on the contrary, the conquest, the
structuration of the world through the effort of labour, along
the path of repetition [...]. The object is encountered and is
structured along the path of a repetition--to find the object
again, to repeat the object. Except, it is never the same
object which the subject encounters. In other words, he never
ceases generating substitutive objects. (Seminar II 100/Le
séminaire II 124-25)
The proximate target of this argument is, of course, Plato's
theory of reminiscence, which holds that the soul recognizes truth
in the world because it has always known it (in the eternal
forms). The analogy is explicit: if every finding is a re-finding,
as Freud says, then this must mean that objects in the world
elicit desire because they correspond with some lost object that
once provided satisfaction. Memory, on this reading, consists of
the more-or-less passive reception of impressions from the world.
18. Lacan rejects this view utterly, arguing that we are constantly
making the world, including the world of desire. Every new object
substitutes for an object that was primally lost, not thanks to a
putative correspondence, but because of the structure of
signification. In "The Instance of the Letter," Lacan writes that
only because remembering can be "rooted in the signifier" that it
"resolves the Platonic aporias of reminscence" (158/"L'instance"
519), a point he glosses in the seminar this way: "the object of
the human quest is never an object of rediscovery in the sense of
reminiscence. The subject doesn't rediscover the preformed tracks
of his natural relation to the external world. The human object
always constitutes itself through the intermediary of a first
loss. Nothing fruitful takes place in man save through the
intermediary of a loss of an object" (Seminar II 136/Le séminaire
II 165). Two things are worth emphasizing here: the first is that
the subject does not so much remember the past as recreate it, in
part because what the subject remembers is the wrong thing: "in
man, it is the wrong form which prevails" (Seminar II 86/Le
séminaire II 109). The second point is that conceptualizing
analysis as the restoration of the past is wrongheaded. If the
restoration of the original object were even possible, it would
spell the death of desire. As Lacan will argue in the seminar on
anxiety, "the subject must fail, necessarily, so that its desire
is not suffocated" (Harari 99). Every object is a re-found object,
but happily, not the original one.
19. Like Freud, Lacan claims that an analysis progresses toward the
past: "the path of restitution of the subject's history takes the
form of a quest for the restitution of the past" (Seminar I 12/Le
séminaire I 19). The key words here are "history" and "takes the
form of," since at those moments Lacan distinguishes between what
analysands believe they are being asked to produce--that is,
memories in the form of reminiscence--and the level at which the
analysis is intervening--that is, history and rememoration. You
cannot simply explain to the analysand that what is unfolding is
imaginary, because, of course, this would elicit aggression. In
other words, as he declared in the seminar on "The
Names-of-the-Father," "the praxis of analysis is obliged to
advance toward a conquest of the truth via the pathways of
deception" ("Names" 95). Or, somewhat less provocatively: "what is
involved is a reading, a qualified and skilled translation of the
cryptogram representing what the subject is conscious of at the
moment" (Seminar I 13-14/Le séminaire I 20). The shift from "a
picture of the past [...] essentially complete" to a "cryptogram"
of the analysand's consciousness during a session gestures beyond
the imaginary, to the symbolic rewriting of history that
characterizes a Lacanian analysis.
III. "Making the Telling Fit the Experience"
Ni du côté de la nature, de sa splendour ou de sa méchanceté,
ni du côté du destin, la psychanalyse ne fait de
l'interprétation une herméneutique, une conaissance, d'aucune
façon, illuminante ou transformante.
--Lacan, "De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la
réalité" (352)[5 <#foot5>]
20. Some of the issues I have been raising may come into clearer focus
if I acknowledge one of the meanings of my title: a chief "time of
interpretation" is, of course, the notorious Lacanian principle of
the variable-length session, derisively referred to as the "short
session" by Lacan's critics. By varying the length of sessions,
Lacan is able to make the temporal experience of a session
meaningful; what's most relevant here is his corollary assertion
that restoring meaning to the analytic session is what makes
authentic regression possible.
21. Lacan's argument for the variable-length session can be found most
clearly in "The Function and Field of Speech" (1953):
It is [...] a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the
subject's discourse. This is why the ending of the
session--which current technique makes into an interruption
that is determined purely by the clock and, as such, takes no
account of the thread of the subject's discourse--plays the
part of a scansion which has the full value of an intervention
by the analyst that is designed to precipitate concluding
moments. Thus we must free the ending from its routine
framework and employ it for all the useful aims of analytic
technique. (44/"Fonction" 252)
If the session is over at the analyst's discretion, rather than at
the end of the fifty minutes, then the analysand is always left to
consider why the session ended at that time: was it because
something important was said, or because nothing at all had been
said, and I was wasting time? Did the analyst have someplace to
be? It stirs up the analysand's discourse, making it more
productive and responsive, if perhaps less comfortable. This
provocation turns out to facilitate the reworking of symbolic
history.
22. When that has occurred, Lacan goes on to say in his next sentence,
authentic regression can come into being:
This is how regression can occur, regression being but the
bringing into the present in the subject's discourse of the
fantasmatic relations discharged by an ego at each stage in
the decomposition of its structure. After all, the regression
is not real; even in language it manifests itself only by
inflections, turns of phrase, and 'stumblings so slight' that
even in the extreme case they cannot go beyond the artifice of
'baby talk' engaged in by adults. Imputing to regression the
reality of a current relation to the object amounts to
projecting the subject into an alienating illusion that merely
echoes one of the analyst's own alibis. (44/"Fonction" 252)
As always, Lacan emphasizes here the gap between the act of
utterance and what is being said. As we have seen, the subject's
speech, especially the narrative he tells of his history, is
fundamentally imaginary: consistent with the ego and with the
subject's self-image. When variable-length sessions stir the
subject up, they can potentially change the frame of such
narratives, "decomposing" the ego that otherwise strives for
unity. It is only as the subject recognizes the extent to which
the ego's tale is not the full story of his desire that some sort
of change could be effected. And as Lacan suggests, inferring from
the subject's narrative that relations with the object are
/currently/ regressed is a kind of causalist myth of the type that
he derided earlier.
23. The variable-length session interferes with the analysand's
attempt to maintain the self-consistency of her discourse. In this
sense, it echoes Freud's advice from "On Beginning the Treatment"
(1913), where he claims that a "systematic narrative should never
be expected and nothing should be done to encourage it. Every
detail of the story will have to be told afresh later on, and it
is only with these repetitions that additional material will
appear" (136). A systematic narrative should not be encouraged, of
course, because that violates the analytic rule and impedes
associations, as I discussed in the previous section. The argument
here is not only that additional material will come into
consciousness--though Freud partly means this; instead, the
repetition of the narrative continually presses against the ego's
attempt at self-mastery. Since such imaginary unity is simply not
possible, ever more material becomes available. The silent common
ground between this early essay by Freud and Lacan's controversial
variable-length session is, simply, /surprise/: they alike
emphasize ways of artificially disrupting the routine of everyday
speech and narrative, in the name of a higher end: the truth.
24. Truth has nothing to do with historical fact. Truth has nothing to
with "what really happened." Truth in analysis is an
interpretation that functions as a cause, one that effects change.
The analyst cannot know whether an interpretation will yield
truth, because, as Lacan writes, the subject receives from
interpretation "the meaning that makes this act an act of his
history and gives it its truth" ("Function" 50/"Fonction" 259). In
other words, an interpretation works because of the subject, not
because of anything inherent in the offered interpretation. Again,
the example of the variable-length session illustrates this
nicely: if ending a session quickly produces a change in the
analysand, it is not because the "message" from the analyst got
through. It is because the meaning the analysand attributed to
that interpretive act changed her approach to the analysis. And in
Seminar IV, Lacan claims that all successful interpretation
depends on misunderstanding: "/C'est la façon dont il faut
s'attendre à ce qu'elle se développe, c'est la moins anormale qui
soit, et c'est justement dans la béance de ce malentendu que se
développera autre chose qui aura sa fécondité/" (341).[6 <#foot6>]
Or, as he would put it a decade later, "an interpretation whose
effects are understood is not a psychoanalytic interpretation"
("Responses" 114/"Réponses" 211). As we saw earlier, failure is
crucial to the maintenance of desire; from a Lacanian point of
view, analysis is partially about pushing a particular failed
narrative until it has to be abandoned, leaving a space for a more
tolerable narrative to emerge.
25. In keeping with Freud's notion of the association, the Lacanian
re-reading of psychoanalysis uses fantasy and imaginary narrative
at cross-purposes. Lacan famously begins his video Television with
just this point: "I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth,
because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally
impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility
that the truth holds onto the real" (3/"Télévision" 509). What
Lacan means here is that the failure of words to refer adequately
to their meanings leaves a space for the subject to come into
being. Because arriving at a final meaning is impossible, the
subject has to commit itself to one meaning over others, and must
suffer the consequences of that commitment. Viewed from this
perspective, the gaps in the analysand's narrative have an
importance as gaps--as spaces of possibility for a different
understanding--rather than simply as holes that would ideally be
filled up.
26. Psychoanalysis is therefore not a hermeneutics. It is not a
question of uncovering hidden or secret meanings, but, rather, a
question of making possible the discovery of /truth./ This
discovery begins, as I have been insisting, when the subject
accepts that imaginary unity is not the whole, or even the most
interesting, story:
In the course of analysis, as I have pointed out to you, it is
when the traumatic elements--grounded in an image which has
never been integrated--draw near that holes, points of
fracture appear in the unification, the synthesis, of the
subject's history. I have pointed out how it is in starting
from these holes that the subject can realign himself within
the different symbolic determinations which make him a subject
with a history. Well, in the same way, for every human being,
everything personal which can happen to him is located in the
relation to the law to which he is bound. His history is
unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the
same for everyone. (Seminar I 197/Le séminaire I 222)
This passage's otherwise exemplary clarity is blurred by the use
of "subject" to refer both to the person in analysis and the
virtual subject on whose behalf an analysis typically is directed.
Lacan here foregrounds the distinction between the "unification,
the synthesis of the subject's history"--that is, the imaginary
narrative that the analysand wants to tell--and the "symbolic
determinations" that give the subject a history. The trauma is
"impossible" or unintegrated at the level of the /imaginary/ (at
the level of the ego), all the while registering itself in the
subject's /symbolic/ history.
27. This symbolic history is rememoration, and refers to the idea that
the syntax or grammar of the psyche is itself a mode of memory--in
fact, it is the only efficacious memory in an analysis, despite
the fact that it cannot be invoked directly. Lacan sees the role
of this rememoration as a way of negotiating the ego's imaginary
demands for unity and the traumatic "impossible" of the real. In
Seminar XI (1964), he describes it this way: "When the subject
tells his story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs
this syntax and makes it more and more condensed" (68/Le séminaire
XI 66). It is this syntax that an interpretation aims at, because
it is what keeps the subject at a specified distance from the
real. This is described in the Ethics seminar (1959-1960) through
the notion of /das Ding/, the extimate arbiter of symbolic
efficacy: "there is not a good and a bad object; there is good and
bad, and then there is the Thing. The good and the bad already
belong to the order of the /Vorstellung/; they exist there as
clues to that which orients the position of the subject according
to the pleasure principle" (63/Le séminaire VII 78). As we saw
earlier, Lacan observes that the subject emerges against the
backdrop of a primal loss, a loss that allows its desire to come
into being and, indeed, which allows the existence of the subject
itself. In the Ethics seminar, that lost item is /das Ding/, and
the job of the pleasure principle and the various unconscious
representations (/Vorstellungen/) is to remember precisely where
that object was lost, so that it will not be directly refound.
Instead, the symbolic order ceaselessly throws up substitutive
objects that provide satisfactions at the level of /Vorstellung/,
without threatening to approach too close to /das Ding/. An
analysand will present for analysis because something at this
level has gotten "jammed." The task of interpretation is to "hit
the real," ideally allowing the subject to come unstuck.
28. Symbolic memory is what functions according to the combinatory of
metaphor and metonymy. Metonymy names, for Lacan, the sliding of
desire from substitute object to substitute object. Metaphor, by
contrast, "is the very mechanism by which symptoms [...] are
determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and
the term it comes to replace in a current signifying chain, a
spark flies that fixes in a symptom--a metaphor in which flesh or
function is taken as a signifying element--the signification, that
is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may
be dissolved" ("Instance" 158/" L'instance" 518). We should not be
confused by the reference to "enigmatic signifier": in contrast to
Jean Laplanche, Lacan is not claiming that there is an original
message to be deciphered. Instead, the signifier is enigmatic
because it is both lost and remembered--lost, primally lost, but
registered all the same within the symbolic. Metaphor names the
process by which that signifier annexes others to itself. And
because, as Lacan observes, a symptom is just an interpretation
that doesn't work, interpretation has to aim beyond the symbolic,
trying to shift or uncouple /das Ding/ from its formal
representations. Symbolic memory is thus at a wholly other level
than reminiscence, "even if the elements organized by the former
as signifiers are borrowed from the material to which the latter
give signification" ("Freudian Thing" 133/"La chose freudienne"
431). In other words, of course it is true that the signifiers
that hold off /das Ding/ are drawn from the subject's experience.
Yet they serve so different a purpose in the symbolic--being
organized entirely in reference to an object that never existed in
experience--that they are finally incommensurate with the
subject's own account of its life.
29. This incommensurateness is, at the end of the day, the good news.
Because there is only a metaphorical connection between the
traumatic real and the experienced events of a person's life,
there is always an opportunity for new metaphors to emerge that
will enable the analysand to find new sources for pleasure, new
chances for satisfaction. And indeed, because symptoms work
according to a process of signification and metaphor, their
meaning is always deferred--including, paradoxically, the question
of whether or not they are actually symptoms! The inference Lacan
draws is that the future determines the past:
The past and the future correspond precisely to one another.
And not any old how--not in the sense that you might believe
that analysis indicates, namely from the past to the future.
On the contrary, precisely in analysis, because its technique
works, it happens in the right order--from the future to the
past. You may think that you are engaged in looking for the
patient's past in a dustbin, whereas on the contrary, it is as
a function of the fact that the patient has a future that you
can move in the regressive sense. (Seminar I 157/Le séminaire
I 180)
Psychoanalytic interpretation creates a past for the analysand. On
the one hand, as Dany Nobus has argued, this makes Lacanian
analysis "less deterministic, for including more radical options
of freedom, less historical, for [being] strictly
future-orientated, and less restrictive, for also accommodating
psychotic patients" (88). Yet it does not turn psychoanalysis into
voluntarism, for the exact same reason that the "cure" works at
all. You can't make an efficacious intervention by simply
repeating the truths of psychoanalysis: "Do not give way on your
desire!" "There is no guarantor of virtue!" and so forth. After
all, words fail. They fail because of the subject's commitment to
its imaginary narrative, but they also fail because history is
/real/--because its thorny perdurability cleaves the subject's
discourse, resisting assimilation to either symbolic or imaginary
memories.[7 <#foot7>]
IV. Time for Concluding
People do History precisely in order to make us believe that
it has some sort of meaning. On the contrary, the first thing
we must do is begin from the following: we are confronted with
a saying, the saying of another person who recounts his
stupidities, embarrassments, inhibitions, and emotions. What
is it that we must read therein? Nothing but the effects of
those instances of saying. We see in what sense these effects
agitate, stir things up, and bother speaking beings. Of
course, for that to lead to something, it must serve them, and
it does serve them, by God, in working things out,
accommodating themselves, and managing all the same--in a
bumbling, stumbling sort of way--to give a shadow of life to
the feeling known as love.
--Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore (45-46/Le séminaire XX 45)
30. By way of conclusion, I want briefly to note the value of
reframing Lacanian concepts in their clinical orientation. A
couple of different kinds of advantages accrue. The first is that
this optic corrects a series of difficulties in the American
reception of Lacan, including the pervasive judgment that Lacan is
more interested in philosophy than in the clinic. As Charles
Shepherdson's Vital Signs explains, until we start to understand
the conceptual specificity of the Lacanian field, we can't
understand the projects of writers like Kristeva, Irigaray, and
Foucault. Further, we will be encouraged to remember that Lacan is
not a poststructuralist in the American sense--not, in other
words, interested in the free play of the signifier, but rather
the opposite of this: obsessed with why signifiers get "stuck" for
a particular subject. We come closer to the real praxis of
psychoanalysis when we insist on the clinical dimension of these
texts. When we strip away Lacan's concepts from their clinical
dimension, we are oriented toward the empty speech of imaginary
narratives.
31. A second reason to think about the Lacanian clinic is that it will
help us do our humanistic business. We better understand the
complex structure of, say, Jameson's "political unconscious" when
we read his claim that "it is in detecting the traces of that
uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text
the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that
the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and
necessity" (20). We can better understand the limits of
traditional applied psychoanalysis, and renounce the practice of
"psychoanalyzing" authors--or, at least, we can recognize this
practice as a kind of folk psychology, fully responsive to the
interpretive demands neither of psychoanalysis nor of literary
criticism. It also reminds us of the privileged relationship--for
both Freud and Lacan--between literature and analysis. Not only in
the sense that Freud and Lacan both insisted that the
preponderance of psychoanalytic training should involve a wide and
deep reading in literature, either. According to Serge André, in
Seminar XXIV: The Non-Known (1976-77), Lacan argues that "in
contrast to the fraudulence of meaning, [...] there is poetry,
which can accomplish the feat of making a meaning absent. He
invites his audience to find in poetry what psychoanalytic
interpretation can hope to be [...]. 'Only poetry [...] permits
interpretation'" (327). Literature offers a field in which we can
learn to break up the congealed meanings impeding our own psychic
life. The analogy between an interpretation and, say, a poem is
helpful: the "point" of an interpretation or a poem--whatever
paraphrase of their meaning we could develop--is far removed from
the material effects of their language. Tracking the effects of
the signifier in language gives us the opportunity to watch our
assumptions about the world fail: an aesthetic and ethical
opportunity alive to the specificity alike of psychoanalysis and
literature, and binding them both to the world.
Department of English
Central Connecticut State University
jonesjason1@ccsu.edu
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Notes
I would like to thank several people for their comments on earlier
versions of this essay: Kate Briggs, Kate Brown, Stephanie
Cherolis, Dan Collins, Angela Hunter, Walter Kalaidjian, Howard
Kushner, Gaurav Majumdar, Kareen Malone, Elissa Marder, and
especially Adrian Johnston and Aimee Pozorski. Christopher Lane
and Robert A. Paul also guided its development.
1 <#ref1>. Sometimes even psychoanalysts make this criticism--see,
for instance, the introduction to the recent collection Bringing
the Plague, which argues that "from a poststructuralist
standpoint, the classical psychoanalytic notion of a psychic
apparatus wholly or largely unformed by the multiple contingencies
of a specific place, time, and society serves to naturalize and
reinforce the privilege of those who hold power in the dominant
culture of the West" (18).
2 <#ref2>. See Copjec, Shepherdson, and Zizek Sublime. I discuss
Shepherdson's argument in more detail in "Sexuality's Failure."
Also relevant is the distinction Eric Santner draws between
"universal" and "global" approaches to difference, in the opening
pages of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (1-8).
3 <#ref3>. Fink's translation here is essentially the same as
Sheridan's (see Sheridan 260). The French provides no insight as
to the putative irony: "Mais ce n'est là bien entendu qu'une
maldonne: on ne guérit pas parce qu'on se remémore. On se remémore
parce qu'on guérit. Depuis qu'on a trouvé cette formule, la
reproduction des symptoms n'est plus une question, mais seulement
la reproduction des analystes; celle des patients est résolue"
("La direction" 624).
4 <#ref4>. See "Direction" Fink 252 ("La direction 627).
5 <#ref5>. Dany Nobus translates this passage thus: "neither on
the side of nature, its splendour or evil, nor on the side of
destiny, psychoanalysis does not make interpretation into a
hermeneutics, a knowledge in no way illuminating or
transformative" (176).
6 <#ref6>. In Nobus's translation: "this is the way one has to
expect interpretation to develop, it is the least abnormal of all,
and it is precisely in the gap of this misunderstanding that
something else will develop, that will have its fecundity" (160).
7 <#ref7>. The argument that history is real is of course
associated with Slavoj Zizek. Space precludes a full discussion of
his multifaceted approach to historicity, which argues
simultaneous that the real is a meaningless kernel and that
certain apocalyptic events come to stand in for the real. For my
purposes, the first version--the historical real as unsymbolizable
kernel--is most useful (see Sublime 119-20 and "Class" 110-11).
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